October 7 Intelligence Failure, Israeli Deterrence, and Netanyahu’s Legacy: A Conversation with Former Head of Israeli Defense Intelligence Major General Amos Yadlin
Amos Yadlin, founder and current president of MIND Israel, a policy advisory think tank, speaks at the “Future of American Foreign Policy” session during the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2020 in Switzerland. Photo courtesy of Christian Clavadetscher.
Following Hamas’s terrorist attack on October 7, which claimed the most Jewish lives in a single day since the Holocaust, Israel launched a response that has devastated the Gaza Strip and garnered substantial controversy around the world. Countries have cut diplomatic ties with Israel; the United States has become increasingly critical of Israel’s conduct; and deep fissures have erupted on college campuses.
As the threat of embroilment in a larger conflict grows for the US and other Western countries, Retired Major General Amos Yadlin offers a unique security-oriented perspective at odds with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan for the war. Mr. Yadlin’s primary concern is Israel’s geopolitical security, which he believes would be best ensured by forging coalitions with neighboring Arab countries.
Mr. Yadlin has an impressive record, having served in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) for over 40 years. A career pilot, he served in the Israeli Air Forces (IAF) before becoming the Israeli military attaché to the US in 2004. In this role, he was responsible for establishing and maintaining the defense cooperation between both countries. Upon returning to Israel, he served as the head of the IDF Military Intelligence Directorate for five years where he oversaw the destruction of Syria’s nuclear program. In 2011, he became the Executive Director of the world-renowned Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), a position he held for 10 years. Under his leadership, the INSS was recognized as the highest-ranked think tank in the Middle East by the University of Pennsylvania Global Think Tank Index. He has been central to Israeli war cabinet briefings and security conferences abroad, and in July, he spoke alongside US Secretary of State Antony Blinken at the Aspen Security Forum.
In addition to his work in the military and intelligence sectors, Mr. Yadlin is active in academia. Before his role at the INSS, he served as a Kay Fellow on Israeli national security at The Washington Institute. As of 2022, he has served as a fellow for the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center.
Today, he leads the Israeli national security consultancy MIND Israel, which he founded in 2023. The group advises Israeli state officials and leaders on policy design and national security recommendations, and it maintains a wide range of focus groups on Iran, Great Power Competition, US-Israel relations, emerging Israeli technology, and more. MIND is an action-oriented NGO that advises Israeli leaders and policymakers on policy design and national security recommendations.
This interview was recorded on August 1, 2024. Several important developments have occurred since the recording of this interview including the Israeli invasion of Lebanon on October 1, 2024 and the killing of Yahiyeh Sinwar on October 16, 2024.
Intelligence Failure of October 7
At your recent talk at the Aspen Institute, you said that October 7 was a trilateral failure—in terms of intelligence, operations, and diplomacy. As an Israeli intelligence expert, how do you understand the intelligence failure that happened on October 7?
I haven’t seen all the intelligence information or material, but based on my conversation with top officials in intelligence and what the media has uncovered until now, I see the main problem with the concept that Hamas is deterred. Israeli intelligence felt that [Yahya] Sinwar cares about the two million people of Gaza, about their welfare, about the economic situation, about their ability to work in Israel. And he will not go to war, since he also knows that because of the balance of power between the two sides, he will lose more than he will gain. This was the concept, and the concept was wrong. They didn’t understand his willingness to sacrifice the welfare and the life and the residents and the economy of the people of Gaza for the sake of kidnapping and killing Israelis.
Even though there was intelligence that revealed Hamas’ planning, the interpretation was according to the concept that Hamas [had been] deterred. In retrospect, you can see that there were many parts of the puzzle [and] that, if they [had been] interpreted and analyzed in the right way, an early warning could have been issued, and if an early warning [had] been issued, all of the attack would have been foiled easily.
In your piece with Politico, which was published only 11 days after Israel invaded Gaza, you deemed Netanyahu primarily responsible for the attacks of October 7. Nine months later, do you maintain that he is still primarily responsible?
As I said, it was a trilateral responsibility: the intelligence, operational failure of the IDF and Southern command, and politically. Netanyahu is to blame on two issues. First, his policy to prefer Hamas to the PA [Palestinian Authority]. Since Netanyahu didn’t want to negotiate with the PA in Ramallah, he wanted Hamas to become the dominant faction in the Palestinian political system. And in a way, he helped Hamas build their military by not preempting and, on the contrary, giving them $30 million every month from Qatar, which helped them build their military.
Second, since January 2023 he [has] pushed Israel into a domestic crisis with the attempt to make a judicial revolution. This split the Israeli public as all of their attention was on stopping Netanyahu’s revolution. The enemies of Israel saw the internal crisis and thought that this [was] a good time to attack. And this is not in hindsight. The letters were sent to Netanyahu from his minister of defense, head of intelligence, head of Shin Bet, and even something I published in March 2023, about the erosion of Israeli deterrence.
Would you also blame Netanyahu for the intelligence’s “compass” that guided how they thought Hamas and Sinwar will operate?
There are a lot of video clips and speeches of Netanyahu that basically describe exactly what happened on the seventh of October based on intelligence, but he did not do anything to stop the scenario. It is his duty to ask questions about his military generals and his intelligence services.
Do you think it is the right time to launch that internal investigation?
I think it is about time to create a formal state commission. According to the law, there are court authorities that can review testimonies and carry out interrogations. Since we have passed the intensive stage of the war in Gaza, I think that it’s time to start to debrief the failure, find those who are guilty, and go a new way.
Direction of the War in Gaza
In June, Netanyahu formally announced that the war had entered “Phase C,” a period that denotes the end of intense fighting in Gaza. What do you take the end of intense fighting to mean?
“Stage C” is targeting the Hamas leaders and doing some raids to areas where Hamas is trying to rebuild itself. This will take time. It took the Americans five years to destroy ISIS. Part of it was intensive, a year of intensive war, and the rest was continuation in a low-intensity war. So this is where Israel is now. Sinwar thought that “Stage C” meant that Israel would be hardly attacking and Hamas could rebuild itself. “Stage C” is still a war, but in a different scale of forces and much more attention to collateral damage.
As an intelligence expert, how do you believe that Israel should balance its security concerns while also granting the Palestinian people autonomy in Gaza and the West Bank?
This is not an intelligence question— this is a political question. The Palestinian civilians who took part in the October 7 attack proved that they are terrorists that want to kill Israelis. They killed 900 civilians in their bedrooms. They killed, they burned, they beheaded, and they raped, and then the Palestinian people supported it in numbers that surprised me, 80% in the West Bank and more than 50% in Gaza. Israel will not take any compromise on its security. In 1993, we reached the Oslo Accords, and a principle tenet was granting the Palestinian people autonomy, but it was based on the fact that [there would be a] demilitarized Palestinian Authority.
What is happening in Gaza is that Hamas, who is not abiding by the tenets of the Oslo Accords, does not recognize the existence of Israel and uses terror. If there [is] a different Palestinian Authority who denounces terror, who recognizes Israel as the state of the Jewish people, and who is willing to live side by side with Israel in peace, granting Palestinians autonomy is a political decision that most of the Israelis will accept.
There is an argument that Hamas’s actions are driven more by an ideology than a particular strategy. Do you not think that consistent Israeli assaults and bombing strengthen this ideology and intensify it?
This is an argument that I’m not buying. The Palestinians, as I mentioned, were educated against Israel, were incited against Israel, and we saw what they mean on October 7. Israel will not educate the Palestinians. When we say that we want to destroy Hamas and dismantle, we do not mean we want to dismantle their ideology. A nation’s ideology will not be changed by another nation. It is changed through education, and it takes generations.
I want to ask a little bit more about Israeli politics internally. In Biden’s June interview with Time, he said that people have every reason to believe that Netanyahu is prolonging the war for his own political benefit. Do you believe these claims to be true?
First and foremost, the one to blame for the war continuing is Sinwar. He started this war, and he could have stopped it at any moment if he were to bring back the hostages. After saying that, I think that the goals of the war that were defined in October were not realistic due to the constraint and limitations on Israeli activity in Gaza. It is impossible to achieve the total victory that Netanyahu is speaking about and at the same time release the hostages. These are two conflicting goals, not to mention the other more dangerous fronts, Hezbollah and Iran.
I think he’s wrong on the first one: Israeli deterrence has mostly now been reestablished. The fact that the leadership of Hamas has mostly been targeted, the fact that Israel was able to attack the Houthis’ port in Hodeidah, targeting [Fuad] Shukr in Beirut and, according to the international media, [Ismail] Haniyeh in Tehran, is what is reestablishing Israeli deterrence. I think it’s time, if all the hostages are released and Hamas demilitarized, to stop the war and rebuild Israel in a way that it can deal with the future challenges.
Is killing Haniyeh, a key negotiator in the ceasefire negotiations, a strategy of Israeli deterrence or does it merely prolong the possibility of a ceasefire negotiation by pushing it even further into the future?
No, Israel is determined to deal with all those who initiated, commanded, and executed the crimes of October 7, one by one, as we did to the terrorists that killed the Israeli athletes at the Olympics in Munich if it will take a year, if it will take three years, or if it will take a decade, and he was one of them. It has nothing to do with the ceasefire. I think the ceasefire can be reached if both Hamas and Israel will make the last step to reach the parameters that will establish the hostage deal.
You do call for a far-sighted Israeli leadership in your Jerusalem Post op-ed. How does or doesn’t the current Israeli government meet these requirements?
Israel should establish a coalition against the Iranian Axis, very much like the one that foiled the Iranian attack in April. This should be based on the US-Israel relationship and include the pragmatic Arab countries that see themselves threatened by Iran. But it can only be created after there [is] a ceasefire in Gaza. And this is what I’m calling for. This is, in my view, the strategic victory of this war, and not what Netanyahu is talking about – ‘a total victory’ in Gaza – a term that he has never been able to define.
Campus Protests
What do you think has fueled such a divisive reaction on college campuses to the war in Gaza? And if you were to lead a conversation on campus, what would you want people to talk about? What do you think is missing for these students to seek common ground?
The main issue is that they don’t want to see Israel for what it is, a country with two million Palestinian citizens. There is not one Israeli citizen under the Palestinian Authority, nor in Syria, Jordan, or Lebanon. But here, we have two million Palestinians who have equal rights. We have tried to solve the problem, but the Palestinians created terror organizations that are spoiling the possibility for peace. They broke all international law when they kidnapped children, women, the elderly, and not let the Red Cross approach [the hostages]. They fight without following any rules of engagement in populated areas, in schools, and in hospitals. This is what most of the students ignore.
There’s an interview with Yair Lapid in the New York Times in which he explains that people don’t understand Israel. Is this something you agree with?
This is not a problem of understanding. This is anti-Semitism in its worst form. A stereotype of Israel without any desire to understand the truth. When I was teaching at Harvard two years ago, I consistently had a couple of protesters outside of my classroom, and I would invite them into class, but they chose to stay outside and disrupt. On the other hand, I also had people from a variety of Middle Eastern countries who were willing to take my class and listen to the Israeli perspective. My advice to the protestors is to be a student who is willing to sit in classes that may challenge your beliefs and to listen to the other side.
Rosie Alchalel is a junior at Barnard studying political science. She spent the past summer in Israel interning for Mr. Yadlin at MIND and as a fellow at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Jerusalem.